Princesses Behaving Badly

by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

  The couple made up enough in 1867 for Elisabeth to become pregnant again, this time with Valerie, the only daughter she raised as she wished. She then spent the rest of her life keeping the emperor at arm’s length. When Franz Josef began a long affair with an actress in 1885, Elisabeth not only promoted the match, she also seems to have orchestrated it by engineering frequent meetings. Her jealousy had clearly transmuted into something else.

  FROM MAD TO WORSE

  Elisabeth’s obsession with her beauty was coupled with a deep persecution complex; as young as 22, she regularly complained of being surrounded by enemies. She wept often and would shut herself up in her room for days. She had a tendency toward hypochondria, which unfortunately was encouraged by her depression, unhealthy diet, and doctors.

  Elisabeth’s fragile state wasn’t entirely unexpected—several of her close relatives also suffered from varying degrees of mental illness. King Ludwig II of Bavaria, one of her favorite cousins, lived a life of romantic isolation before allegedly turning dangerously paranoid and violent. She was aware that mental illness ran in the family and dwelled on the idea that she, too, would one day go insane. Even if she hadn’t had a genetic propensity to madness, there was plenty in her life to drive a sane person batty. Along with constant political turmoil and increasing isolation, Elisabeth suffered personal tragedy. Her siblings and relatives were dying in increasingly awful ways (fire, firing squad, shipwreck), and in 1889 her estranged son killed himself and his 17-year-old mistress in a suicide pact. It’s no wonder, then, that for her birthday one year, she asked for a Bengal tiger and, barring that, a fully operational lunatic asylum.

  Elizabeth’s response to the pressures of her life was flight, which exacerbated her problematic self-imposed isolation. One courtier remarked, “She has a mind diseased, and she leads such an isolated life that she only makes herself worse.” But constant travel helped bring Elisabeth back to the person she thought she was. She could be brilliantly happy, especially when foxhunting in Ireland or swimming in the Greek islands. When away from court, she was charming, kind, solicitous, and loving to her children and husband. Perhaps that’s why she pursued travel with almost as much fervor as she policed her own body.

  Elisabeth’s mother once wrote to her, “You don’t know how to live or to make allowances for the exigencies of modern life. You belong to another age, the time of saints and martyrs. Don’t give yourself too much the airs of the saint or break your heart imagining yourself to be a martyr.” These words proved strangely prophetic. Elisabeth did become a martyr of sorts, emblematic of the dying European empires. While out on a walk in Geneva on September 10, 1898, she was stabbed through the heart by an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni. She was 60 years old. Her murderer later said he had been looking for a crowned head to murder that day, and Elisabeth just happened to fit the bill. Adding insult to injury, Lucheni said, “She wasn’t very beautiful. Quite old already.”

  BEWARE THE BLACK DWARF

  Princess Catherine Radziwill, a disgraced member of Eastern European royalty (read about her on this page), sometimes earned a living writing celebrity tell-alls about the aristrocrats of Europe, including a book titled The Black Dwarf of Vienna and Other Weird Stories. In this collection, the titular dwarf was a dreaded specter who appeared before every disaster that befell the Austrian royal family.

  The dwarf was rumored to be a court fool in the employ of an Austrian emperor, but the emperor, for reasons unknown, executed the jolly man, condemning him to haunt the palace ever after. He was first seen “laughing sardonically” while wandering the halls of the Hofburg in Vienna in 1683, just before the city was besieged by the Turks. Only when the city was rescued by the Polish army did the dwarf disappear. He was practically a court fixture during the reign of the unhappy Maria Theresa, an empress who “hardly knew a quiet moment during the long years that she occupied her throne,” according to Radziwill. He appeared the day the French queen and former Austrian princess Marie Antoinette mounted the scaffold to lose her head. On that occasion, he at least had the good grace to look “immeasurably sad.”

  The only time the Black Dwarf was ever seen outside the Hofburg halls was when he appeared to the illfated Empress Elisabeth and her lady-in-waiting at a hotel in Geneva. According to Radziwill: “He flitted before Elizabeth as she proceeded along the passage, but as she was to enter her apartments, he vanished, but not without having made her a sign of farewell, which was but too well understood a few hours later, when the dagger of Luchenni sent the Empress into eternity.”

  Charlotte of Belgium

  THE PRINCESS WHO SCARED THE POPE

  JUNE 7, 1840–JANUARY 19, 1927

  MEXICO BOTH REAL AND IMAGINED

  A polite princess—a polite anyone, really—knows not to stick her finger in the pope’s hot chocolate. But when Princess Charlotte of Belgium burst in on His Holiness’s breakfast at the Vatican, she was starving—she hadn’t eaten more than a few bites in days, convinced that her enemies were trying to poison her. The pope’s morning cocoa had to be safe, right? Surely no one would try to poison the pope…

  MEXICAN ADVENTURE

  Charlotte wasn’t always a crazed chocoholic. Life for the pretty, dark-haired princess began promisingly enough. She was born in 1840, the daughter of Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, King of the Belgians, and his second wife. Despite being named after Leopold’s first (dead) wife (see “Death and the Victorian Age,” this page), nothing in her early years hinted at the tragedy to come. Serious and smart, little Charlotte started reading Plutarch at age 11 and was her father’s favorite. At 16, she fell in love with Ferdinand Maximilian, the 24-year-old Hapsburg archduke and brother of Austrian emperor Franz Josef. Handsome (sort of) and passionate, he talked philosophy and religion with the fervor of a true believer. Against her father’s wishes—he planned a match for her with the king of Portugal—she married Maximilian on July 27, 1857.

  Unfortunately, Max’s passions weren’t limited to philosophy and religion. Charlotte tried to keep up the pretense of a happy marriage, but by 1859 she was no longer intimate with her unfaithful husband. Rumors began circulating that he’d given her a venereal disease, although later biographers suggest that Max, who preferred novelty and new experiences, was simply “unable to perform” with her.

  In 1863, Napoleon III offered Maximilian the crown of Mexico, a country that had just spent decades embroiled in conflict and civil war. The republic was restored in 1860, but the reformist government under liberal Benito Juarez was broke and burdened with foreign debts. In 1861, on the pretense of trying to reclaim their lost money, France, Spain, and England invaded Mexico. After the latter two countries pulled out in April 1862, Napoleon III—craving the kind of empire his uncle had won—kept his troops in the capital. Maximilian was part of the French emperor’s plan to solidify his claim in Latin America and form an alliance with Austria.

  But from the moment Max marched into Mexico City in June 1864, it was clear the whole “Mexican empire” was an illusion. Most Mexicans did not want a foreign ruler; few cheered when the new emperor paraded through the city. They had good reason to be angry. On every corner of the squalid capital, people left maimed and poor by the last war were begging for food. No one working for the imperial government had been paid, and debts were mounting.

  At first, Charlotte was keen to get to work. “This country is a vast field in need of cultivation,” she wrote to her first cousin, Queen Victoria of Britain, adding that there was nothing else to do “but to till that field.” But the hand at the plough was shaky—Maximilian was as bad a leader as he was a husband. He enacted several pieces of good legislation, but his policies lurched from overly liberal to overly conservative, and too often he listened to bad advice. Meanwhile, Benito Juarez was running a rebel government in Chihuahua, which the American government, among others, recognized as official in 1865. Napoleon III, facing increasing international and domestic pressure as well as the continued resistance of the Mexican reb
els, was threatening to take his troops and go.

  As the situation deteriorated, so, too, did Charlotte’s mental stability. She’d tried to take an active interest in her imperial duties, touring the Yucatan and hosting charity events, but by 1865–66, she was wilting. She hated Mexico City and began to find it overwhelmingly dirty and dangerous. She suffered terrible headaches. A deep melancholia that she’d fallen into after her father died never truly dissipated. With the end of sexual relations with her husband, she no longer hoped to have a child; the Mexican public taunted her for being a “barren woman.” At the same time, word reached her that the gardener’s wife at her husband’s Cuernavaca retreat was carrying his child. Just 26 years old, Charlotte sent increasingly incoherent letters to Maximilian that revealed a woman on the verge of a breakdown: “I think you should send [Queen] Victoria a decoration so you can get the Garter. God have mercy on our souls in Purgatory. I think it is going to snow.”

  But when Napoleon III gave the order to cut off all martial and financial support and reason demanded that Max abdicate, Charlotte sprang into action to defend her throne. In August 1866, she traveled alone to Europe to appeal directly to the French leader.

  FIGHT POISON WITH THE POPE

  The empress’s mental state was questionable even before she left for Europe, but the strain of her critical mission proved overwhelming. According to accounts, she was thin and haggard and seemed far from the serious but youthful princess who’d left Europe less than three years before.

  The meeting with Napoleon III took place behind closed doors; later, Charlotte accused her hosts of trying to poison her. A second meeting went even worse, ending with Empress Eugenie pretending to faint to stop Charlotte’s raving about the wrongs done to Mexico and the promises made by France. Then Charlotte went completely mad, seemingly undone by her failure to convince the French monarch to continue propping up the Mexican empire. She decided that duplicitous Napoleon was the Devil himself, out to destroy her and her husband. She became obsessed with the idea that the emperor’s assassins were trying to poison her food and drink.

  Throughout her European visit, Charlotte raved that her father, mother, and Prince Albert had all been poisoned; even now, she claimed, prisoners were trying to kill her, too. Some evenings she would eat only oranges and nuts, examining the peels and shells to make sure they were intact. She saw spies everywhere—while traveling in Italy, she was convinced that a peasant in a field had come to kill her on Napoleon’s orders; an organ-grinder in the streets of Bozen was another of his murderers. Her entourage, who’d come with her from Mexico, became the objects of grave suspicion, and her periods of lucidity were fewer and farther between.

  Just when it seemed as if Charlotte couldn’t go any crazier, she did. On September 30, while in Rome, she ordered a carriage to drive her to the famous Trevi Fountain. Once there, she jumped down and gulped desperate handfuls of water, muttering, “Here, at least, it will not be poisoned. I was so thirsty.” Then she ordered the carriage to take her to the Vatican, where she demanded an audience with Pius IX. Flushed and shaking, Charlotte begged him to protect her from Napoleon’s assassins. Seeing a cup of hot chocolate on the table, she pounced on it, dipping her fingers in and licking them, wailing, “I’m starving! Everything they give me is poisoned!”

  Charlotte refused to leave the pope’s presence, spending hours ranting about the situation in Mexico. By midday, the storm seemed to have passed. At lunch she behaved almost normally, save her demand to eat off the same plate as her lady-in-waiting, and by the afternoon she was persuaded to return to her hotel. But upon noticing that her room keys were missing—they’d been taken with the intention of locking her in that night—she became hysterical and demanded to be returned to the safety of the Vatican. So at ten that night they all trooped back, where the patient pope ordered that the library be turned into a bedchamber. “Nothing is spared me in this life,” he remarked wryly, “now a woman has to go mad in the Vatican.” The next morning, after Charlotte passed a quiet night under the influence of serious sedatives, she refused to eat or drink anything that hadn’t been prepared for His Holiness.

  A regular madwoman was one thing, but a crazy empress was a much bigger diplomatic problem. Tongues were wagging, and it became clear that someone had to figure out how to extract Charlotte from her papal safe haven. One of the cardinals hit upon asking the mother superior of a local convent to invite Charlotte to visit the orphans in their care. A flattered Charlotte agreed, at first playing the role of the kind, charitable empress. But then she was shown the kitchens, where she commented on the delicious smell wafting out of the cooking pots. The nun showing her around offered her some of the ragout, using a knife that had a speck of dirt on it. Charlotte began screaming, “It’s poison! Only God has saved me!” But she was still starving—she hadn’t eaten since early that morning, and in her deranged state she thought that meat snatched directly from the boiling pot would be safe. The burns to her hand were so bad that she fainted while having them dressed.

  The doctors could see that Charlotte was suffering from a “severe congestion of the brain,” as they wrote to her husband, but what to do about it beyond a steady diet of “bromides” (sedatives) was unclear. The week between September 30, when Charlotte burst in on the pope, and October 6, when she was committed to the care of an imperial physician, was a long one. Her hotel was emptied of guests to minimize the risk that Charlotte would fly into another violent rage over “assassins” coming to kill her. In the mornings, she would direct a carriage to drive her to one of Rome’s many fountains, where she’d fill a crystal jug and drink from a glass she’d taken from the papal rooms. She refused to eat anything that hadn’t been prepared in front of her; her servants bought live chickens to be killed and trussed before her eyes and kept them tied to the legs of a gilded table in her royal suite. Her letters to Max careened from loving missives by a woman convinced she was dying to an embittered paranoiac convinced that her husband had been trying to murder her.

  THE EMPIRE STRIKES OUT

  Back in Mexico, Max was waking up to the fact that his empire was a hopeless cause. His wife was insane, French troops were leaving, and a bloody civil war was well under way. But rather than abdicate his throne, abandon his followers, and return to Europe in shame, he decided to stay. It would be an act of suicide.

  The French left Mexico on February 5, 1867. With just 8,000 loyal soldiers against Juarez’s roughly 40,000, Max waited out a siege at Santiago de Querétaro. The city fell on May 15, and Max and his generals were caught trying to escape. They were tried for treason and sentenced to death by firing squad. On June 19, 1867, Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico was executed by the new government of the country he’d tried to adopt.

  Charlotte was never told about her husband’s death; for the rest of her life, she was kept in Belgium by her family. Afraid of everyone and everything, she lived in a castle surrounded by a moat, physically and mentally cut off from the outside world. Although she did have lucid moments, Charlotte lived mostly in her own twilight world, never realizing that Max was dead. She waited for him to return, sometimes asking her servants why he was late for dinner. And every spring, she would walk down to the moat, step into a little boat anchored there, and proclaim, “Today we leave for Mexico.”

  ROYAL HOTLINE TO HEAVEN

  Charlotte of Belgium may have gotten an audience with the pope, but one princess claims her reach extends above even him. Princess Märtha Louise (b. 1971), the only daughter of King Harald and Queen Sonja of Norway and fourth in line to the throne, said she knew as a child that she could read people’s feelings, that she was clairvoyant. It wasn’t until her experiences with horses that she realized she could communicate with angels as well as the dead.

  In 2007, she and Elizabeth Nordeng (a fellow spiritualist whom she met at a clairvoyance course) opened Astarte Education, an English-language school in Norway that aims to help individuals find their own “spiritual passwords,” creat
e miracles, and “get in touch with angels.” Since then, the princess and Nordeng have written several books—best sellers in Norway—about their spiritual journey. They write, “There are an infinite number of angels all around us who want to help us in all circumstances and at all times.… They are there for us. They are real. They exist.” The year it opened, the school offered a three-year course in angel spirituality at an annual cost of $4,150; it now offers workshops in angelic communication, too.

  Märtha Louise’s claims to contact extra-earthly beings didn’t endear her to Norway’s religious community—her father, after all, is nominally the head of the state church. In 2010, Norwegian bishop Laila Rikaasen Dahl told the local news, “We don’t know enough about the status of the dead, but they belong to God and should be allowed to rest. We should remember the dead, not try to get in touch with them.” Others warned the princess that trying to contact the dead was “unhealthy.” The palace, however, is staying mum about the princess’s hotline to heaven.

  Franziska

  THE AMNESIAC WHO BECAME THE LOST ROMANOV PRINCESS

  DECEMBER 16, 1896–FEBRUARY 12, 1984

  THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE; MULTIPLE MENTAL HOSPITALS; CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA.; AND THE WORLD’S IMAGINATION

  On the night of February 17, 1920, a Polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska slipped off a bridge in Berlin and plunged into the icy waters of the Landwehr Canal. She was, she admitted later, trying to kill herself. And in a way she succeeded.